Hear the isolated tracks for the Def Leppard song ‘Photograph’
We can all safely say that Def Leppard were a great band now, right? With more than 40 years of playing in their collective back pocket, the Sheffield rockers had to endure car accidents, changing pop culture tastes, and the wrath of people who preferred “cool” music. In truth, Def Leppard were probably never the coolest band in the world, but for a brief period, they might have been the biggest.
What’s strange is how difficult it is to place Def Leppard among their peers. While most of their contemporaries in early 1980s Britain were either going towards synthpop or heavy metal, Def Leppard threaded the needle between those two genres. Their closest competition was American glam metal bands, but even that genre tag didn’t quite fit with Def Leppard. They were battling bands like Bon Jovi, but something felt different about them.
They certainly had a signature sound: immaculately layered harmonies, crunchy guitars, screeching vocals, and powerful drums. It was pop music with a healthy dose of heavy metal, compressed into the most radio-friendly sound that has ever been produced. Def Leppard were world builders, assembling every piece of a song’s arrangement to maximise its impact.
Through the help of producer and collaborator Mutt Lange, Def Leppard managed to hit upon their signature sound by 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry. Their follow-up, 1983’s Pyromania, contained one of the band’s most enduring tracks, ‘Photograph’. Equal parts high-octane rock song and smooth pop hit, ‘Photograph’ was Def Leppard’s breakthrough in America, becoming their first top-20 hit in the US.
Going through the song, the most immediate hook is the effects-heavy lead guitar riff. It’s what opens the song and immediately draws you in. That rhythm guitar line doesn’t actually belong to either of the two guitarists in the band at the time, Steve Clark and Phil Collen. It was recorded by original rhythm guitarist Pete Willis, who receives a writing credit on ‘Photograph’ and recorded most of the album’s rhythm guitar tracks before he was fired prior to the album’s completion.
When you isolate Rick Allen’s drums on ‘Photograph’, they almost seem too precise to be natural. The reverse reverb on Allen’s snare certainly isn’t, but there’s some contention as to whether ‘Photograph’ was assembled from samples of Allen’s kit or if Allen played the track live. Engineer Mike Shipley later confirmed that all of Allen’s drum parts on Pyromania were programmed after the fact using a Fairlight sampler, but that’s surely a technological feat in itself.
“There are no real drums. The cymbals are played, but the bass drum, snare, and toms are all machine,” Shipley told Tape Op. “We had all kinds of drums in there, and I sampled them into the Fairlight and detuned them. We’d sample them in at half-speed, thinking that we’d get a better sound, because that’s when Fairlight was at 8 bits – you had to get around that part of it.”
Finally, we get to Joe Elliott’s vocals. Elliott was at the peak of his high-pitched banshee wails while recording ‘Photograph’, with everything from the song’s pre-chorus to the final soaring notes of the song putting Elliott at the top of his range. It’s a remarkable performance, especially considering the lack of pitch-correction at the time. It’s just Elliott belting out the song with a little double-tracking and delay to help him along.
Check out the isolated tracks for ‘Photograph’ down below.
